MentalPolyphonics
Where have all the plumbers gone?
One thing that was sad was people emphasizing...Robert Greene’s blog, Power, Seduction, and War, is kinda going again. He’s the author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War, hence the title. I checked it last night while revising for my interview just now (it went well, thanx, and the laws were very useful). The sound bite about Greene is that he’s the “modern Machiavelli”.
He’s done a couple more posts in the last few months to pimp his new book co-written with 50 Cent, The 50th Law, ostensibly about how fear controls our lives. “50 bled his fear out into the gutters of the New York ghetto — now u can 2!”
The book, which just came out (there’s an interview with Greene in the Globe today), strikes me as a naked exercise of the laws. It helps build 50′s personality cult while convincing people to depend more on Greene. The 48 laws, for example, are all good strategies for things like complicated games (poker, chess, go, Avalon Hill games, German games, business, etc). But telling people that a book will help them defeat fear might just be creating a need and then selling the solution.
That said, the times in poker and life when I’ve acknowledged my fear and implemented a strategy anyway have, without fail, been fulfilling.
“Fuck this guy, it’s time to raise him with air.”
“Fuck it, time to eat a bunch of mushrooms and hand out flowers to strange women.”
“Fuck it, time to walk out on this job.”
Or, you know, blogging. There’s fear here too. There’s fear pretty much everywhere, but you just deal. That’s humanity. I’ve been heckled while public speaking — it wasn’t that bad. I even met my own personal fear demon once. Again: Not too terrible.
I don’t want to come off as an expert, writer’s block is a kind of fear too, but I know the basic strategy. I asked an actor once, just after he read Gordon’s part in Jaded for me, how being a professional creative person was possible for him, how he sheltered his ego from the constant rejection that’s simply the name of the game.
“You just do your best,” he said, “and sometimes it works.”
Wise words. In poker they say, “there’s no point in being results-oriented.” Same thing. You gotta be in it to win it, but success itself has a large random factor susceptible to multiple retries. You gotta accumulate that expected value.
Digressions aside: You have to meet and murder your fears. A book probably won’t help. You “just” need to do it (though to be fair The 50th Law is billed as containing meditations on fear, which sounds interesting in a sith-zen way).
All-in, I will be getting the book because I’m a fan of both Jackson and Greene. Actual review to follow.
Jared
I tried to read The Art of Seduction recently. It really struck me that Greene was just making up theories off the top of his head after picking a few stories he liked from history.
Jack
Yeah, that book sux. His worst.